Monday, December 2, 2013

Time Off — Day 7 & Thanksgiving

The Tuesday before Thanksgiving I was busy watching my parish boys win their first football state championship, and the next day we had a number of people missing for helping out on a junior high retreat, so I had them do their first-ever worksheet. It followed up on what we did on Monday, and later on I'll attach a link for it here.

I had them break off into groups of three and four and illustrate, in their own way, the ideas of persons and roles and who was addressing whom. This was a place where what I had in my mind is definitely not the direction they went. I was thinking that they would draw pictures which could only represents something like Est Iacobus discipula aut discipulus?; they just thought of a picture that kinda-sorta represented this statement or idea. My idea, based on my experience of doing things like Rosetta Stone, was for them to create a one-for-one image that represents this statement and vice versa.

On the second page they were to take basic English sentences and turn them in the Latin. Anyone who has taken a Latin class knows that going from English to Latin is generally more daunting than going from Latin to English. The latter is basically playing "crack the code" and trying to smooth out a literal translation into something more fluid. But at this point, our vocabulary is so simple, and I really want them to get a feel for the flexibility of the word order in Latin, that I thought it was a worthwhile exercise. Heck, I even included a Word Box, just so they wouldn't feel pressed on vocabulary and could rather focus on the sentence structure. That part went more according to my plan.

Wednesday we looked over these sheets, discuss what I actually had planned on but had failed to communicate, and tried to do a little review to just batten down our mental hatches before a four-day weekend. We'll see what results.